Thursday, September 08, 2005

I like Pages and this sounds good too. So two Word alternatives. I want to test the two out with my wife.

Update 9/9: The main thing Emily needs is something that handles Word documents seamlessly. Pages doesn't do the trick because it translates first to pages, then you have to export. Too confusing. AbiWord is another option; it uses its own file format (which I hope/pray is the OpenOffice format) but if you open a Word document it saves and edits as Word.

I'm not sure what Nisus does here but I think Pages may not work for Emily.

Update 9/10/05: AbiWord worked pretty well, but I'm very impressed with Nisus writer. Default format is RTF, but if you open a Word document it saves it as word. Good trial policy but you can't print without a watermark on the last page. Nice outliner styles, even though it's not really an outliner. Much as a like much of Pages I don't like yet another file format. Apple hasn't made it an open spec as far as I know.

On reflection I'm thinking Nisus might be ahead of AbiWord. Interestingly the two share some code, I think they use the same open source code for word document management.